I am used to my name changing abroad. My last name, ‘Gödde’, has one of the German ‘Umlaute’ which don’t exist in the standard international Latin alphabet – the ‘ö’ is usually transliterated as an ‘oe’. Computers often replace it with all sorts of foreign letters, depending on their nationality. This has, on occasion, caused some minor difficulties, e.g. when trying to argue that the ‘Mr. Gödde’ who has registered a room is in fact me. Since not only the letter but also the sound doesn’t exist in a lot of languages, my last name has furthermore been pronunounced like anything from ‘good day’ to things my German tongue in turn can’t replicate properly.
It took Ukrainian bureaucracy, however, to add an entirely new name.
I wanted to pick up a packet from the central post office in Dnipropetrovsk. It makes obvious sense that this involves showing some form of identification. Here, however, an elaborate form was shoved into my face. By the look of it this had probably been once designed to record all the information of a Soviet passport, and independence had changed little but the name of the postal service at the bottom of it.
A lot of the information was easy enough to provide. First name, last name, date and place of birth, number of the passport, date and place of issue – all information that can be found in a German passport.
The series number proved to be a first problem. German passports are not issued in series, and after a short argument with the lady at the parcels counter, I was allowed to skip it.
She would not, however, budge on the issue of the patronymic. Patronymics are the part in Ukrainian or Russian names that are derived from the name of the father with an -vich added for men and an -vna added for women, e.g. Ivan Petrovich, Natalia Petrovna. The lady insisted that this was not a manner of missing information in the passport. Surely I knew the name of my father, and thus could provide her with a patronymic. The logic of this was difficult to argue with.
Forming the patronymic was easy enough, but I needed to change my father’s name, from ‘Helmut’ to ‘Gelmut’ since the Russian alphabet does not contain the equivalent to ‘h’. I tried saying it to myself first: ‘Alexander Gelmutovich Goedde’. It sounded so strange that putting it down on paper afterwards made me feel like I was pretending to be somebody else. Luckily, I only have to be that person when I am at the post office.
Text by Alexander Gödde, Germany
